L'HOMME-FEMME: ELLE ET LUI. 193 men of war, “I, who am a woman, am resolved upon victory or death; but as for you, who are men, you may, if you please, choose life and slavery." When Henry, the last of the Valois, on the memorable day of the Barricades, sat crying from morning to night in the Louvre, the Queen-mother scolded him for his tears and his indecision. "This is no time for crying," said Catherine. "And for myself, though women weep so easily, I feel my heart too deeply wrung for tears. If they came to my eyes, they would be tears of blood." Of equally masculine spirit was the Princess of Cambray, who, in 1595, after her husband (Balagny) had fled, endeavoured to arouse the mutineers to a sense of duty or shame-she who night and day had gone the rounds of the ramparts, to animate the garrison, and with her own hands had fired the cannon against the enemy's works. This heroic Renée was sister of Bussy d'Amboise; and Mr. Lothrop Motley refers to Balagny as a poor creature with a heroine for a wife. When all was lost at Cambray, it was with bitter reproaches on her husband's pusillanimity, with tears and sobs of rage and shame, that, spurning the idea of capitulation, Renée refused all food, and there an end. Ægisthus, in the Clytemnestra of Owen Meredith, is for flight, though the queen taunts him bitterly with rank cowardice: "Now, by Apollo, be a man for once! Be for once strong, or be for ever weak!" Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible, in the words of Shakspeare's York; but she stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless: "O tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a woman's hide!" The chronicler of celebrated crimes tells us of Beatrice Cenci, far as she was from the Jezebel or Clytemnestra type, that when the sbirri shrank from slaying her sleeping father, she indignantly reproached them with their womanish scruples: their cowardice nerved her hand, she said, and she, puny girl, would undertake what was too much for them, to the manner born and bred. "Go, coward," said Ali Pacha's mother to the young man, when he returned to Tepelene one day without either spoil or arms, from an expedition in which he had been 66 forced to fly: "Go and spin with the women,”—and she held out to him a distaff as she spoke,—“ that suits you better than the use of arms." She had long before this equipped herself in warrior's array, and, heading the chiefs of the Albanian mountains, after losing her husband, gave battle to the enemies of her house. In the veins of this energetic woman the blood of Scanderbeg is said to have flowed. As a gentler and more refined type of imperial or imperious womanhood, shining by contrast with the irresolution and weakness of male kindred who ought to command, the last Queen of the French may be named, Marie Amélie, who, when the crash came, and the last of the Bourbon kings displayed a weakness which, says a friend of the House of Orleans, was all but abject," thus shone by contrast, in all the dignity of a woman and the daughter of a hundred kings. We may, it is admitted, be sceptical as to the heroic words, of which more than one version is recorded, by her addressed to the trembling and disheartened Citizen King; but there can be no question that, in whatever form the protest was spoken, the Queen of the French, in her last hour of sovereignty, passionately and indignantly combated the notion of abdication. "In that melancholy collapse of spirit and duty, the only man in the Orleans family was a woman.” Not, however, that she is represented as being, either by nature or taste, a heroine of the melodramatic form associated with the name of the Queen of Naples; for at least she held her own place to be on her knees, but she would have a man do a manly part, and a king a kingly. Typical of a homelier order of domestic relations are George Weston and his wife in the novel, where we see the former, for instance, at an agitating crisis, collapsing under the shock, and tremulously wiping the perspiration from his bald forehead, while he shakes his head to his wife with a piteous gesture, as if to declare his inability to comprehend her. With an effort Mrs. Weston recovers herself-such an effort as only great women or wicked women are capable of,-and then her outcry is, "Oh, you men! What big silly babies, what nervous creatures you are!" It is the style of Juletta in Beaumont and Fletcher's Amazonian play, where Clarinda speaks of certain men's "base poor fears :" "Ay, that makes me hate them too: -If they were but manly in their sufferance!" Compare the style of a latter-day tragedy, in which a Roman citizeness warns Roman citizens, should a deprecated event ensue, never more to expect from their wives and sisters the titles of husbands and brothers, “Or anything that doth imply the name Of men-except such men as men should blush for." In miscellaneous fiction we may glance at Esther, in the Prairie, demanding, “Have I a man among my children?” and following it up by showing her stalwart sons "what the courage of a frontier-woman can do." The Anne of Austria of Vingt Ans après bids Mazarin "Leave me! You are not a man!" and his muttered response comes, "It is you who are not a woman;" much in the spirit of Smollett's terrified painter, “I do behave like a man; but you would have me act the part of a brute." Mrs. Proudie's appeal to the bishop is, “Why do you not rally, and go to your work like a man?" And elsewhere : "I'll tell you what it is, my lord; if you are imbecile, I must be active. It is very sad that I should have to assume your authority." "I will not allow you to assume my authority," he plucks up spirit enough to assert. But she resumes her argument: "I must do so, or must else obtain a medical certificate as to your incapacity. . . . I, at any rate, will do my duty." She seems to ask, with Wordsworth's Oswald, "Are we men, or are we baby spirits?" Divest her of her professionalism, and she might have been the heroine of that story, familiar among lawyers, which tells how an Old Bailey barrister was challenged by a learned friend in consequence of a dispute in court; and, being unable to muster resolution either to fight or refuse to fight, he invented the expedient of leaving the letter of challenge on the table of a room which he quitted as his wife entered it. Returning hastily, he picked up the letter, and hoped that his wife had not read it. Yes, she had; and he must fight, she said. We have seen, in the opening paragraph of this paper, how Beckford takes occasion to point his description of Carathis as being as wicked as woman could be, by the comment how much is implied in such a saying, since "the sex pique themselves on their superiority in every competition." Albany has some reason to tell Goneril that "Proper deformity seems not in the fiend So horrid as in woman, for already have she and Regan wrung from him the exclamation, "Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed!" Note, again, that when cruel Cornwall bids fetch forth the stocks, and vows that as he has life and honour, there shall Kent sit till noon,-"Till noon!" echoes the more cruel Regan; "till night, my lord; and all night too." Had it been one of the elder daughters of Lear, King of Britain, instead of the one daughter of Cymbeline, King of Britain, with whom Leonatus Posthumus had had to do, a better right he might have claimed to rail as he did at the supremacy of womankind in miscellaneous naughtiness: For there's no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman's part: Be it lying, note it, All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows, * Margaret of Anjou has her measure taken much after the same pattern by captive York: she wolf of France, he calls her to her face, but worse than wolves of France : "Whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth! How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex To triumph like an Amazonian trull, Upon their woes whom fortune captivates! * Constance, wife of Robert le Sage (or le Dévot), is sometimes compared with Margaret, just as King Robert is with Henry VI. Constance it was who, with characteristic ferocity, struck out the eye of one of the sufferers condemned for heresy, in A.D. 1022,-formerly her own confessor,as he passed her on his way to the stake. A WOMAN MAY BE MADE. But that thy face is, visor-like, unchanging, I would assay, proud queen, to make thee blush." 197 La Bruyère says, "Les femmes sont extrêmes: elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes." Prison warders of their own sex declare female prisoners of the worst kind to be far more wicked than the male criminals; and it is held that, were it not for their comparative incapacity to organize concerted action, the management of them would probably be beyond the power of man or woman either. Such books as the Prison Matron's Female Life in Prison, with its records of woman brutalized by crime, savagely ferocious, furiously and violently vindictive, slily and coldly malicious, brazened and hardened irreclaimably, teach us how undivine a thing a woman may be made; and they go far to justify some of the scathing lines of Juvenal, about modern instances of Medea and Procne and the like : "Minor admiratio summis Debetur monstris, quoties facit ira nocentem In another satire his argument is, that vindictiveness is an "O woman, woman, when to ill thy mind Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend !" A couplet almost reminding one of the closing stanza of News in the poems of a Wanderer : "The Devil, my friends, is a woman just now; 'Tis a woman that reigns in hell."* Compare the exclamation of Molière's Sganarelle, en sortant de l'accablement dans lequel il était plongé : "Cette ruse d'enfer confond mon jugement; |